How Animals Grieve

by Barbara J. King

  And so it is with the breaking and surging of response to mass-scale death. It ripples out from immediate survivors to extended families, from the local community to the whole nation, across continents and oceans. The grief of one converges with the grief of many, tumbling into and sometimes exacerbating the felt emotion. This upwelling is haunting, and entirely human.

  A generation of Americans witnessed this process in the days, months, and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It’s a cliché that many people of many nations remember with startling clarity precisely where they were and what they were doing on that Tuesday morning. I had begun teaching 125 anthropology students at 9:30 a.m., and as the news from Manhattan and the Pentagon became increasingly dire and the students and I became increasingly anxious, I ended class early. Our mourning began that very day, but where had it been the day before, on Monday, September 10? Was it gathering itself in baby ripples, conjoining to explode the next day with terrible force? The question may sound peculiar, but in the context of Goldman’s study of waves it makes sense to me. Goldman muses about the long journey of “Aura’s wave,” the strong pull of water that eventually tumbled her so violently through the surf that she would die. Most surface waves travel thousands of miles before breaking on a beach. “It’s not the water itself that travels, of course, but the wind’s energy,” he writes. “Large waves charge steadily along on high-velocity winds that have been traveling across the open ocean for many thousands of miles and for days.”

  It wasn’t, I think, grief that gathered itself together in the days and hours before 9/11. It was love: the love that people felt as they kissed or waved good-bye to family and friends that morning. The love drives the grief as the wind drives the ocean waves.

  When the first tower collapsed in Manhattan that day, Jean-Marie Haessle, a French-born artist, began to hurry uptown. But he stopped on Wall Street and scooped up some of the dust that was falling all around him. It was an impulse, he told the New York Times. The dust calls to mind, he said, his own eventual death; he keeps it safe in the paper envelope in which he first collected it. What makes up this dust? Surely it must contain parts of the fallen tower, bits of the office machines and papers and other compressed objects from everyday working lives. But does it contain more . . . ? I find it impossibly painful to ask the question any more precisely; we all remember the thousands lost, and realize what other material the dust may contain. Haessle curates the dust for a museum audience of one, and for him it carries great symbolic power.

  I see an invisible ribbon of time that connects Haessle, the contemporary artist in New York, with our forebears from Sunghir in Russia and Qafzeh and Skhul in Israel. To set aside space for the dead, to mark the relationship of the living with the dead through an elaborate burial or a respectful keeping of ashes—or through a capital city’s disorienting memorial that draws millions of visitors from around the world—is at one and the same time a thoroughly human act and an act that is possible because we are social animals who evolved from other social animals who grieve.

  AFTERWORD

  “[Grief] occurs widely in other social mammals and in birds, for example after loss of a parent, offspring or mate.” So wrote John Archer on the first page of The Nature of Grief.

  It’s rare to find such a complete embrace of animal grief in the social-science literature—especially in 1999, when Archer was writing, before the current wave of scientific interest in mammal and bird mourning. Archer followed up his straightforward assertion with only a three-page review of evidence that supports it. He discusses corpse-carrying in monkeys and apes, anecdotal reports of grief in birds and dogs, and results of “separation experiments” showing that the young in a variety of species become distressed when separated from their mothers. Of course, Archer could not have included information on animal mourning from the last fifteen years. It’s safe to say that science-minded readers may find a gap between Archer’s confident claim of animal grief and the support he marshals for it from the animal world.

  Have the stories presented in these pages succeeded in closing the gap between a claim for animal grief and the evidence? Unsurprisingly, my own verdict is “yes,” but I know that it is important to make distinctions between the strong and the moderate or weak evidence contained in these pages. In deciding between these alternatives, one benchmark could be the ideal definition of grief that I offered in the prologue: Grief can be said to occur when a survivor animal acts in ways that are visibly distressed or altered from the usual routine, in the aftermath of the death of a companion animal who had mattered emotionally to him or her.

  Using this benchmark, numerous examples in this book offer strong evidence for grief among animals living in the wild. Long-term research on two elephant populations in Kenya—Samburu in the north and Amboseli in the south—has tracked individual elephants’ response to death. Kin and friends reacted to the death of the elephant matriarch Eleanor at Samburu in distressed or unusual ways, and elephants in Amboseli caressed the bones of their matriarch. Interestingly, one piece of evidence from Samburu complicates the framework I’m using. Females mourned for Eleanor who hadn’t been particularly close to her in life, leading researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton to posit a “generalized” response to death among elephants. If Douglas-Hamilton is right, elephants may show more community-wide (in addition to kin- and friend-based) emotional responses to death than other animals—or perhaps in the coming years we may find community-wide reactions in other species.

  The elephant evidence provides, I believe, the strongest case for animal grief in the wild, closely matched by that for dolphins, chimpanzees, and some birds. In dolphins, the maternal response to infant death is heart-wrenching to watch, attesting to severe maternal distress. Intriguingly, corpse-carrying mother chimpanzees (and monkeys) don’t to my knowledge show overt emotion, but some chimpanzees do demonstrably mourn, as we know from Flo’s son Flint at Gombe and Tina’s little brother Tarzan at Tai, Cote d’Ivoire. With pair-bonded birds, mourning may lead to serious depression in the survivor.

  Not all of my examples from the wild convincingly meet the strict definitional criteria. With the male sea turtle in Hawaii who had lost Honey Girl, his presumed mate, the bison in Yellowstone National Park who inspected their companion’s carcass, and the corpse-carrying monkey mothers who seem unaffected emotionally by their burden, the evidence is suggestive of grief to varying degrees, but not conclusive. Even in these unresolved cases, however, the absence of a family member, a groupmate, or a social partner changed the survivors’ behavior in measurable ways. And in the case of monkeys, we have the baboon anecdote from Okavango in which the mother Sylvia grieved for her daughter Sierra, plus the physiological data showing a chemical signature of bereavement in multiple individuals.

  Among animals who live closely with humans, in homes, farms, sanctuaries, or zoos, some cases of grief also meet my stringent definition. I can’t imagine interpreting the stories of cat sisters Willa and Carson, or dog friends Sydney and Angel, with a focus other than grief: to my mind, the signs of love and mourning in these stories are too overwhelming to reasonably be interpreted away. The same is true for rabbits and horses, in numerous examples that I have shared.

  The two rescued mulard ducks Kohl and Harper made an especially poignant pair; that Harper loved and grieved for his friend is, for me, beyond sensible contesting. The behavior of Tarra the sanctuary elephant when her small dog friend Bella died reminds us that two animals of very different natures may experience keen friendship and, for the survivor, sadness when that friendship comes to a sudden end.

  Zoos may become a leading source of data on animal grief in the future. Right now, the recorded behaviors of gorillas and chimpanzees around death in zoos and similar captive institutions raise more questions than they answer. When the female chimpanzee Pansy died in a Scottish safari park, why did the male Chippy attack her corpse? What does it signify when the companions of a zoo gorilla who has died continue to search for
that individual even though the body had been visible to them? Perhaps more than any other animals, our closest living relatives, the African apes, clue us in to the great variability in mourning behaviors, both in wild populations (in the case of chimpanzees) and captive ones.

  And when it comes to unanswered questions, the whole issue of animal suicide stands out. The examples of bear and dolphin emotional suffering I’ve included take us into the arena of possible intense grief for a lost loved one or for one’s own intolerable living situation. Science has barely even considered these possibilities, or, if animal suicide does exist, its range of possible causes.

  We humans have our own species-specific ways of mourning. The final two chapters have considered how we may turn grief into art, and how our burial rituals and other death practices have evolved over many millennia. Yet what stands out for me isn’t human uniqueness, but the knowledge that animals other than humans do love, and do grieve. As I have stressed throughout the book, this statement shouldn’t become a litmus test of emotional complexity for other species. Some dogs will grieve, depending on their personalities and the contexts in which they live. Some dogs won’t. The same is true for chimpanzees and other species who have mourned in a way that we recognize. The expression of animal emotion doesn’t lend itself well to bold generalization across individuals—any more than the expression of human emotion would.

  In reviewing the stories of animal grief in order to write these closing passages, it comes back to me how thoroughly joy tangled with sadness as I researched and wrote. The sadness emerged, of course, because I immersed myself in the lives of animals who had a deep channel of grief running through their emotions, sometimes briefly and sometimes for extended periods.

  But then there was the joy: I discovered the depth of animal love. Because of this, I look at many animals differently now than I did even three years ago. Compared to my other books, this one required a broader look across the animal kingdom; the payoff came when I discovered emotions in animals—in farm animals most of all, but really across the board—that were more complex than I had ever suspected.

  Also joyful was my experience of friends, relatives, scientific colleagues, and complete strangers who know me only through my writing, all sharing stories about how animals grieve (or in some cases, don’t grieve). A sense of “being in it together,” of wanting to figure out new ways of perceiving, describing, and analyzing animal love and animal grief, knotted us together.

  Views contrary to my own were at times enlightening. When I wrote about animal love at NPR’s 13.7 blog, I didn’t question whether animals feel love but asked, how do we recognize the love that other animals feel? Even as ideas and examples poured in, some readers insisted we shouldn’t pick apart animal love. Trena Gravem asked, “Why define love? Why overthink it and try to analyze it? Instead we should be extremely thankful that we have love for others, and they for us; and of course it goes without saying, this includes animals. Sadly, only children do not question this.” Meg Ahere wrote, “I would prefer to start from the assumption that every animal feels emotions and loves others in its own way.”

  These views are articulate and embrace a stance that is wide-open to the expression of complex animal emotion. Yet for me, as a scientist, the bottom line is this: If every animal who acts in a positive or compassionate way toward a companion is said to love, and if every animal who responds with some display of emotion to a dead companion is said to grieve, we run the risk of diluting the phenomenon we want to understand. And we don’t learn much.

  I hope that the ideas and questions in this book will be taken up by others who will strive to discover more about how individual animals grieve, or don’t grieve. Maybe my very definitions of love and grief can be improved, and entirely new questions added to the mix. What’s important is to continue the conversation, because it’s not one mired only in theoretical concern, or even in concerns about how we may understand ourselves better by understanding other creatures. To plumb the depths of animal thinking and feeling means to reassess how we, collectively as a society and individually as persons, treat other animals. I’ve already discussed the beneficial practice of allowing surviving animals some time with the bodies of their loved ones. With this practice, we recognize that animals think and feel, and offer to grieving animals the compassion and dignity they deserve.

  And here come echoes of my joy-and-sadness theme again: For animal lovers, the knowledge weighs heavy that animals in the wild, housed on farms or in sanctuaries or zoos, or alongside us in our homes, may struggle or may have struggled in various ways because of human neglect or abuse. Even here, though, there’s room for joy: We may bring about a shift, a sea change from treating animals as somethings to treating them as someones—just as Farm Sanctuary teaches us.

  I would like to conclude on a personal note. In 2005, a column called “Always Go to the Funeral” was broadcast by NPR as part of its “This I Believe” essay project. In it, Deirdre Sullivan described her parents’ insistence that she, as a shy teenager, attend the funeral of a grade-school teacher. Trying to squeeze out a few words of condolence to the teacher’s family, the young Sullivan felt mortified. Only later did she appreciate being raised to understand that some acts mean so much to others that your own discomfort, or inconvenience, matters little. She concludes with this passage:

  On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I’ve ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

  Also on an April night, my own father died. It was 1985, and he had lived to be sixty. First in the Navy during World War II, later as a fireman and then for decades as a New Jersey state policeman who fought organized crime, he served others. During his funeral, the gunfire salutes offered by his former state police colleagues brought tears to my eyes. What is rooted most firmly in my heart since that day isn’t the official ceremony, though. It is the gathering together of many people who interrupted their spring day to sit with us, to honor my father with their words, and to transfer their strength to my mother and me.

  It’s no accident, I think, that I chose to write a book about grief when I entered my mid-fifties. It’s true that in doing research for earlier works, I kept bumping up against bits and pieces of evidence for animals’ emotional responses to death. In that sense, this book grew naturally from seeds planted in the previous two. Yet there’s more going on. I am part of the great wave of baby boomers who now approach—or have reached—the retirement years. My only child is in college. My mother is in assisted living. With a narrow escape after emergency surgery at the age of eighty-four, she finds herself needing more complicated care than ever before. Now eighty-six, she may live as long as her own mother, to one hundred, or she may be gone sooner. My mother’s life is intertwined with mine in a way it hasn’t been before—except, of course, when I was very young. When I talk with friends around my age, our conversation veers often into elderly-parent territory. We share the worry, exhaustion, and yes, the satisfaction too, of caring in various ways for our mothers and fathers.

  As I negotiate details of my mother’s stays in hospitals, nursing-home rehabilitation centers, and her assisted-living residence, I feel profound love for her mixed with an anticipatory grief. Frequently, I learn that someone close to me is in the grip of fully realized grief: One friend’s mother dies shortly before her ninetieth birthday, after a long struggle with cancer. Another’s father, in his eighties, is gone after a short period of intense physical decline; my friend is sure he willed himself to die, helped along by his refusal to eat. Another friend’s son dies right after Christmas in a terrible car wreck at age seventeen. For that mother, I feel wild sorrow, and know of no way to of
fer comfort. All I do know is to share her love for her son, which survives him in abundance.

  It won’t ease our deepest grief to know that animals love and grieve too. But when our mourning becomes a little less raw, or is so far only anticipated, may it bring genuine comfort to know how much we share with other animals? I find hope and solace in the stories in these pages. May you find hope and solace in them as well.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My first and heartfelt thanks go to the people who have met or communicated directly with me for this book about the animals they live with, or once lived with: Karen and Ron Flowe, Nuala Galbari, Janelle Helling, Charles Hogg, Connie Hoskinson, David Justis, Melissa Kohout, Jeane Kraines, Michelle Neely, Mary Stapleton, and Lynda and Rich Ulrich.

  I am grateful also to those who wrote comments about their experiences with animal grief in response to my posts at NPR.org’s 13.7 Cosmos & Culture blog. To my 13.7 editor, Wright Bryan, thanks for teaching me so much.

  To the scientists and zoo staff members who generously responded to my questions and shared material with me, I owe sincere thanks: Karen Bales, Tyler Barry, Marc Bekoff, Melanie Bond, Ryan Burke, Dorothy Cheney, Jane Desmond, Anne Engh, Sian Evans, Peter Fashing, Diane Fernandes, Roseann Giambro, Liran Samuni, Karen Wager-Smith, and Larry Young.

  My admiration as well as my gratitude goes to the staff of the Elephant Sanctuary–Tennessee, the Farm Sanctuary, and the House Rabbit Society, who helped me with material about animal mourning and who help thousands of animals in need.

  Through its research leave program, the College of William and Mary made possible the period of intense reading and writing from which this book emerged. To provost Michael Halleran, director of research communications Joseph McClain, and my colleague anthropologist Danielle Moretti-Langoltz, special primate gestures full of thanks.